Bush Says He Wasn't Misled on Iraq

WASHINGTON -- President Bush, in what the White House said was his first interview with online news organizations, declined to say Tuesday that he had been misled leading up to the war with Iraq five years ago.

Speaking with Mike Allen, the chief political writer of Politico.com, Bush covered an eclectic collection of topics -- from the erroneous intelligence that formed part of the foundation of the case he made for invading Iraq to his choices for building a top-dollar baseball team and his rating of the comedians cast as him and his father, the 41st president, on NBC's "Saturday Night Live."

(OK, we'll answer that one right away: Between Will Ferrell's George W. Bush and Dana Carvey's George H.W. Bush, he chose Carvey.)

The interview, a joint effort by the online and on-paper political journal and the Internet portal Yahoo.com, was posted in transcript, video and news-report formats about six hours after Bush talked with Allen, first in the Oval Office and then in the White House Roosevelt Room.

In answering a question submitted online -- whether he thought he had been misled about Iraq -- Bush said he felt that Saddam Hussein's regime did have weapons of mass destruction.

"You know, 'mislead' is a strong word, it almost connotes some kind of intentional -- I don't think so, I think there was a -- not only our intelligence community, but intelligence communities all across the world shared the same assessment. And so I was disappointed to see how flawed our intelligence was," the president said.

"Do I think somebody lied to me? No, I don't," he went on. "I think it was just, you know, they analyzed the situation and came up with the wrong conclusion."

Members of Congress were told, as was he, Bush said, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and they voted for the resolution supporting the war. "And of course, the political heat gets on, and they start to run and try to hide from their votes," he added.

His decision to give up golf in 2003 was a direct result of the war, he said: "I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander-in-chief playing golf. ... I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal."

When Bush's father ordered troops to the Persian Gulf during the summer of 1990, before the 1991 Persian Gulf War, he was sharply criticized for regularly golfing on a course near his summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine.

When told that Carter had said the next president could change the United States' image in 10 minutes by promising in the inaugural address to rule out torture of prisoners or attacks on other countries unless U.S. security was directly threatened, Bush said:

"What he really is implying is -- or some imply -- you can be popular; if you want to be popular in the Middle East, just go blame Israel for every problem. That will make you popular."

He took a similarly defensive tenor in responding to questions about his climate change policies, saying that he could have signed the Kyoto Protocol, which set targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions but which he described as a "lousy treaty." He added: "I don't think you want your president trying to be the cool guy and not end up with policies that actually make a difference."

Even as he has sidestepped most questions about the 2008 presidential race, he offered a backhanded acknowledgment that Sen. Barack Obama is likely to be the Democratic nominee. The Illinois senator would be the first African-American to win a major party's presidential nomination.

Asked whether the nation was facing "a kind of ugly conversation about race this fall," Bush responded that "race will only enter in if it's provoked by the press."

As for his baseball pick, his first choice -- if he had a "Yankees-like wallet" to build a team -- is Chase Utley of the Philadelphia Phillies.

"There's nothing better than having a good person up the middle that can hit," said Bush, a former part owner of the Texas Rangers.